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Up front I'll note I am twice divorced. I was in two open marriages. From my perspective, that's really all you need to know.
But for more detail, the first marriage doesn't count as "open" because it never really was. I got married right out of high school, and after living together for about six months, we both realized we had made a grave error in judgment. We'd been great friends, still are friends actually, and she is also the mother of my only child. But we were not compatible as partners, for more reasons than I care to count. The open marriage idea was presented to us by a mutual friend who before being a friend was our sociology professor. He was in an open marriage (more on that in a moment as the non-personal story) and was the ultimate, unrealistic, idealist. He thought that since we were having a child, we should try to stay together, and we might be able to do that by having an open marriage that allowed us to pursue other interests in other people while sharing our lives in close proximity to our daughter. He was a genius to us at the time, so we talked about it and thought that since he was so smart, he might actually know what he was talking about. We didn't really *want* to get divorced; we just didn't want to be around each other all the time. We thankfully gave up on that notion before our daughter was old enough to remember any of it. That year of our lives was worse than previous six months. I was never "with" anyone else during this, despite several opportunities. She was with one, and one late night, she told me she might be falling in love with him.
That, as they say, was that.
The second marriage lasted four years. My wife, after we were married, started describing herself as bisexual, and she wanted to explore that side of herself with me. She had a lesbian friend (one that occasionally indulged in men as a diversion) to whom she'd always been attracted, and one evening we were hanging around with the previously mentioned friend/professor when she started talking about this. Again with the open marriage advice. I was young and much stupider at the time, and I thought this might actually turn out to be fun. It wasn't. My wife had her relationships. We had mutual relationships that were actually just escapades in debauchery, and I must say that the Penthouse Forum letters must all be lies because, from my perspective, it is not all it is cracked up to be. More like a job than fun. Anyway, I didn't have anything outside of the marriage during this, but she did. I never felt what would truly be called jealousy ... just ignored, mostly, sometimes used. It was weird. My wife could pick up women on the basis of it being a threesome, which I didn't quite understand and still don't. But it never really had much to do with me. After the first few experiences I just found it ... too complicated, even boring, and as noted, more like work.
As an aside, there's a movie kinda sort about this that has Mariel Hemingway in it ... can't remember the name of it. Her husband wanted them to have threesomes, and when she finally relented, he discovered he wasn't really needed. Funny movie. I completely identified with that part of his character.
Anyway, then my grandmother died.
When my grandmother died, I fell into a bottle. She had been a parent, not a traditional grandmother, and we were very, very close, and I felt lost afterward, and my perpetual battle with chronic depression took on the root strength of a hundred year oak tree. My wife didn't understand that, didn't think chronic depression was "real" or that my relationship with my grandmother could truly be what I said it was. She was "just" a grandmother. My depression and my drinking started to piss her off, which of course pissed me off, and the "openness" of our marriage became more and more open on her end, as well as being more secretive.
(Why am I revealing all this? I don't know. Moving on.)
At about the same time a close friend of ours suffered the death of her mother at a rather young age, in her 40's I think. We started seeking solace in each other because we felt no one else understood at all, and truly no one our age with whom we were friends really did. My wife certainly didn't, and our friend's father had found his own bottle and pretty much ignored his daughter's existence. Things progressed from there, and for the first time I exercised my prerogative in this supposedly open marriage. My wife left me about six months later and went to live with some guy she had been seeing without my knowledge (it had grown beyond her wanting to explore her bisexuality by that point, also without my knowledge). It was okay for her, she said, because she wasn't emotionally involved. It was not okay for me because I was.
And then everything went to hell, but eventually it all got better, and here I am some ten years later pretty much okay.
The non-personal story: The friend/professor who seemed to be present at the moment of inspiration for both open relationships had an open marriage for about 20 years. Then they decided they wanted to have children and that living such a lifestyle was not a good environment for a child. What they found, though, was that while they truly did seem to manage the openness of their relationship while it was open, going back was impossible. About a year after they "closed" their marriage, they too divorced and never had a child.
In short, I'm not a fan and would never be involved in one again.
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